10CH - 6 Crossfader Ableton DJ-Mixer

[TomTom79]

Hi Guys,

I'm starting an international Live House/Nu Jazz Project: programmed beats mixed live with Ableton & live musicians: Bass, Guitar & Vibraphone- I call it Essential Tides.

I'm coming from the turntable mixing, with robust DJ mixers (easy going faders...). That's the reason, I was looking for such a mixer for Ableton live. But the only things I could find: 1. Cheap mixers (I would destroy after some minutes of mixing) 2. Very expensive mixers in good quality, but not with the faders I wanna have.

I had the following idea: I wanna mix my beats not only 1 beat into another, I wanna be able to fade/cut Bassdrum, Snare, Hats, Percussion & "Harmonies" separately. Reason: we wanna improvise on stage, not only make parts of tracks longer or shorter, make it also calmer... Means: I need a mixer with 5 Channels. But I also wanna mix 2 different Tracks together, so I need 2x5 channels, & for easier mixing: a 2 Channel Master-Section (1 CH for every beat). I have now the possibility, to mix 2 tracks in this way: take the Bassdrum from the "old" track & mix it into the new... Or take away the Hats of the "old" track & mix 1st in the Hats from the new Track...

But for this, I also wanna have crossfaders. Best would be a Crossfader between the 2 Bassdrums, the 2 Hats,... Means: 6 Crossfaders (incl. Master-Crossfader). They also have to be nonlinear (for cutting...).

I bought:

- a "Doepfer USB64": 64 Ch Analog to Midi Converter.
- Lin.-Long life easy going stereo Bourns Faders.

For the Crossfaders I had to make them nonlinear with some resistors & it was tricky to tell Ableton, how to route the crossaders cause: if you make the routing with ableton, you move the actuator on a controller, but with crossaders you have 2 actuators at the same time. So I made the routing before connecting the faders.

Cause I have 40 CH left,

I bought:

- ALPS Potis (same as in Pioneer mixers but mono) & made for every Ch also an FX section & for Masters also EQ. But of course: you can route it to every function on ableton. The front panel "I" made with 2mm Alu, lasercutted for 30.- Euros! I don't have any pics in the moment.

I have also put some gadgets into it: Cause we wanna have a backup-system on stage if one pc crashes, we wanna control 2 pcs at once. So they are always making the same things... If one crashes, I just fade in the other. But with USB-Midi it's not(?) possible to control 2 soundcards in parallel, so we will do it with the traditional Midi-Network: I put a cerebel USB to Midi converter into the mixer. So I can also connect my AKAI MPC-Mini directly to the Mixer. Cause the Doepfer-Card has a Midi Merge, I can merge my Midi Signal from the MPC to the signal of my mixer & go out of my mixer with just 1 Midi-Cable to my soundcards.

Cheers

Tom